"Gens ista avia et secreta habitat, in montibus horrendis foeda
mysteria celebrat. De hominibus nihil aliud illi præferunt quam
figuram, ab humano ritu prorsus exulant, oderunt deum lucis. Stridunt
potius quam loquuntur; vox absona nec sine horrore auditur. Lapide
quodam gloriantur, quem Hexecontalithon vocant, dicunt enim hunc lapidem
sexaginta notas ostendere. Cujus lapidis nomen secretum ineffabile
colunt: quod Ixaxar."
"This folk," I translated to myself, "dwells in remote and secret
places, and celebrates foul mysteries on savage hills. Nothing have they
in common with men save the face, and the customs of humanity are wholly
strange to them; and they hate the sun. They hiss rather than speak;
their voices are harsh, and not to be heard without fear. They boast of
a certain stone, which they call Sixtystone; for they say that it
displays sixty characters. And this stone has a secret unspeakable name;
which is Ixaxar."
I laughed at the queer inconsequence of all this, and thought it fit for
Sinbad the Sailor or other of the supplementary Nights. When I saw
Professor Gregg in the course of the day, I told him of my find in the
bookcase, and the fantastic rubbish I had been reading. To my surprise,
he looked up at me with an expression of great interest.
"That is really very curious," he said. "I have never thought it worth
while to look into the old geographers, and I daresay I have missed a
good deal. Ah, that is the passage, is it. It seems a shame to rob you
of your entertainment, but I really think I must carry off the book."
The next day the professor called to me to come to the study. I found
him sitting at a table in the full light of the window, scrutinizing
something very attentively with a magnifying-glass.
"Ah, Miss Lally," he began, "I want to use your eyes. This glass is
pretty good, but not like my old one that I left in town. Would you
mind examining the thing yourself, and telling me how many characters
are cut on it?"
He handed me the object in his hand, and I saw that it was the black
seal he had shown me in London, and my heart began to beat with the
thought that I was presently to know something. I took the seal, and
holding it up to the light checked off the grotesque dagger-shaped
characters one by one.
"I make sixty-two," I said at last.
"Sixty-two? Nonsense; it's impossible. Ah, I see what you have done, you
have counted that and that," and he pointed to two marks which I had
certainly taken as letters with the rest.
"Yes, yes," Professor Gregg went on; "but those are obvious scratches,
done accidentally; I saw that at once. Yes, then that's quite right.
Thank you very much, Miss Lally."
I was going away, rather disappointed at my having been called in merely
to count a number of marks on the black seal, when suddenly there
flashed into my mind what I had read in the morning.
"But, Professor Gregg," I cried, breathless, "the seal, the seal. Why, it
is the stone Hexecontalithos that Solinus writes of; it is Ixaxar."
"Yes," he said, "I suppose it is. Or it maybe a mere coincidence. It
never does to be too sure, you know, in these matters. Coincidence
killed the professor."
I went away puzzled by what I had heard, and as much as ever at a loss
to find the ruling clew in this maze of strange evidence. For three days
the bad weather lasted, changing from driving rain to a dense mist, fine
and dripping, and we seemed to be shut up in a white cloud that veiled
all the world away from us. All the while Professor Gregg was darkling
in his room, unwilling, it appeared, to dispense confidences or talk of
any kind, and I heard him walking to and fro with a quick, impatient
step, as if he were in some way wearied of inaction. The fourth morning
was fine, and at breakfast the professor said briskly:--
"We want some extra help about the house; a boy of fifteen or sixteen,
you know. There are a lot of little odd jobs that take up the maids'
time, which a boy could do much better."
"The girls have not complained to me in any way," I replied. "Indeed,
Anne said there was much less work than in London, owing to there being
so little dust."
"Ah, yes, they are very good girls. But I think we shall do much better
with a boy. In fact, that is what has been bothering me for the last two
days."
"Bothering you?" I said in astonishment, for as a matter of fact the
professor never took the slightest interest in the affairs of the house.
"Yes," he said, "the weather, you know. I really couldn't go out in that
Scotch mist; I don't know the country very well, and I should have lost
my way. But I am going to get the boy this morning."
"But how do you know there is such a boy as you want anywhere about?"
"Oh, I have no doubt as to that. I may have to walk a mile or two at the
most, but I am sure to find just the boy I require."
I thought the professor was joking, but though his tone was airy enough
there was something grim and set about his features that puzzled me. He
got his stick, and stood at the door looking meditatively before him,
and as I passed through the hall he called to me.
"By the way, Miss Lally, there was one thing I wanted to say to you. I
daresay you may have heard that some of these country lads are not over
bright; idiotic would be a harsh word to use, and they are usually
called 'naturals,' or something of the kind. I hope you won't mind if
the boy I am after should turn out not too keen-witted; he will be
perfectly harmless, of course, and blacking boots doesn't need much
mental effort."
With that he was gone, striding up the road that led to the wood; and I
remained stupefied, and then for the first time my astonishment was
mingled with a sudden note of terror, arising I knew not whence, and all
unexplained even to myself, and yet I felt about my heart for an instant
something of the chill of death, and that shapeless, formless dread of
the unknown that is worse than death itself. I tried to find courage in
the sweet air that blew up from the sea, and in the sunlight after rain,
but the mystic woods seemed to darken around me; and the vision of the
river coiling between the reeds, and the silver gray of the ancient
bridge, fashioned in my mind symbols of vague dread, as the mind of a
child fashions terror from things harmless and familiar.
Two hours later Professor Gregg returned. I met him as he came down the
road, and asked quietly if he had been able to find a boy.
"Oh, yes," he answered; "I found one easily enough. His name is Jervase
Cradock, and I expect he will make himself very useful. His father has
been dead for many years, and the mother, whom I saw, seemed very glad
at the prospect of a few shillings extra coming in on Saturday nights.
As I expected, he is not too sharp, has fits at times, the mother said;
but as he will not be trusted with the china, that doesn't much matter,
does it? And he is not in any way dangerous, you know, merely a little
weak."
"When is he coming?"
"To-morrow morning at eight o'clock. Anne will show him what he has to
do, and how to do it. At first he will go home every night, but perhaps
it may ultimately turn out more convenient for him to sleep here, and
only go home for Sundays."
I found nothing to say to all this. Professor Gregg spoke in a quiet
tone of matter-of-fact, as indeed was warranted by the circumstance; and
yet I could not quell my sensation of astonishment at the whole affair.
I knew that in reality no assistance was wanted in the housework, and
the professor's prediction that the boy he was to engage might prove a
little "simple," followed by so exact a fulfilment, struck me as bizarre
in the extreme. The next morning I heard from the housemaid that the
boy Cradock had come at eight, and that she had been trying to make him
useful. "He doesn't seem quite all there, I don't think, miss," was her
comment; and later in the day I saw him helping the old man who worked
in the garden. He was a youth of about fourteen, with black hair and
black eyes, and an olive skin, and I saw at once from the curious
vacancy of his expression that he was mentally weak. He touched his
forehead awkwardly as I went by, and I heard him answering the gardener
in a queer, harsh voice that caught my attention; it gave me the
impression of some one speaking deep below under the earth, and there
was a strange sibilance, like the hissing of the phonograph as the
pointer travels over the cylinder. I heard that he seemed anxious to do
what he could, and was quite docile and obedient, and Morgan the
gardener, who knew his mother, assured me he was perfectly harmless.
"He's always been a bit queer," he said, "and no wonder, after what his
mother went through before he was born. I did know his father, Thomas
Cradock, well, and a very fine workman he was too, indeed. He got
something wrong with his lungs owing to working in the wet woods, and
never got over it, and went off quite sudden like. And they do say as
how Mrs. Cradock was quite off her head; anyhow, she was found by Mr.
Hillyer, Ty Coch, all crouched up on the Gray Hills, over there, crying
and weeping like a lost soul. And Jervase he was born about eight months
afterwards, and as I was saying, he was a bit queer always; and they do
say when he could scarcely walk he would frighten the other children
into fits with the noises he would make."
A word in the story had stirred up some remembrance within me, and
vaguely curious, I asked the old man where the Gray Hills were.
"Up there," he said, with the same gesture he had used before; "you go
past the Fox and Hounds, and through the forest, by the old ruins. It's
a good five mile from here, and a strange sort of a place. The poorest
soil between this and Monmouth, they do say, though it's good feed for
sheep. Yes, it was a sad thing for poor Mrs. Cradock."
The old man turned to his work, and I strolled on down the path between
the espaliers, gnarled and gouty with age, thinking of the story I had
heard, and groping for the point in it that had some key to my memory.
In an instant it came before me; I had seen the phrase "Gray Hills" on
the slip of yellowed paper that Professor Gregg had taken from the
drawer in his cabinet. Again I was seized with pangs of mingled
curiosity and fear; I remembered the strange characters copied from the
limestone rock, and then again their identity with the inscription on
the age-old seal, and the fantastic fables of the Latin geographer. I
saw beyond doubt that, unless coincidence had set all the scene and
disposed all these bizarre events with curious art, I was to be a
spectator of things far removed from the usual and customary traffic and
jostle of life. Professor Gregg I noted day by day. He was hot on his
trail, growing lean with eagerness; and in the evenings, when the sun
was swimming on the verge of the mountain, he would pace the terrace to
and fro with his eyes on the ground, while the mist grew white in the
valley, and the stillness of the evening brought far voices near, and
the blue smoke rose a straight column from the diamond-shaped chimney of
the gray farmhouse, just as I had seen it on the first morning. I have
told you I was of sceptical habit; but though I understood little or
nothing, I began to dread, vainly proposing to myself the iterated
dogmas of science that all life is material, and that in the system of
things there is no undiscovered land even beyond the remotest stars,
where the supernatural can find a footing. Yet there struck in on this
the thought that matter is as really awful and unknown as spirit, that
science itself but dallies on the threshold, scarcely gaining more than
a glimpse of the wonders of the inner place.
There is one day that stands up from amidst the others as a grim red
beacon, betokening evil to come. I was sitting on a bench in the garden,
watching the boy Cradock weeding, when I was suddenly alarmed by a harsh
and choking sound, like the cry of a wild beast in anguish, and I was
unspeakably shocked to see the unfortunate lad standing in full view
before me, his whole body quivering and shaking at short intervals as
though shocks of electricity were passing through him, and his teeth
grinding, and foam gathering on his lips, and his face all swollen and
blackened to a hideous mask of humanity. I shrieked with terror, and
Professor Gregg came running; and as I pointed to Cradock, the boy with
one convulsive shudder fell face forward, and lay on the wet earth, his
body writhing like a wounded blind-worm, and an inconceivable babble of
sounds bursting and rattling and hissing from his lips; he seemed to
pour forth an infamous jargon, with words, or what seemed words, that
might have belonged to a tongue dead since untold ages, and buried deep
beneath Nilotic mud, or in the inmost recesses of the Mexican forest.
For a moment the thought passed through my mind, as my ears were still
revolted with that infernal clamor, "Surely this is the very speech of
hell," and then I cried out again and again, and ran away shuddering to
my inmost soul. I had seen Professor Gregg's face as he stooped over the
wretched boy and raised him, and I was appalled by the glow of
exultation that shone on every lineament and feature. As I sat in my
room with drawn blinds, and my eyes hidden in my hands, I heard heavy
steps beneath, and I was told afterwards that Professor Gregg had
carried Cradock to his study, and had locked the door. I heard voices
murmur indistinctly, and I trembled to think of what might be passing
within a few feet of where I sat; I longed to escape to the woods and
sunshine, and yet I dreaded the sights that might confront me on the
way. And at last, as I held the handle of the door nervously, I heard
Professor Gregg's voice calling to me with a cheerful ring: "It's all
right now, Miss Lally," he said. "The poor fellow has got over it, and I
have been arranging for him to sleep here after to-morrow. Perhaps I may
be able to do something for him."
"Yes," he said later, "it was a very painful sight, and I don't wonder
you were alarmed. We may hope that good food will build him up a little,
but I am afraid he will never be really cured;" and he affected the
dismal and conventional air with which one speaks of hopeless illness,
and yet beneath it I detected the delight that leapt up rampant within
him, and fought and struggled to find utterance. It was as if one
glanced down on the even surface of the sea, clear and immobile, and saw
beneath raging depths, and a storm of contending billows. It was indeed
to me a torturing and offensive problem that this man, who had so
bounteously rescued me from the sharpness of death, and showed himself
in all the relations of life full of benevolence and pity and kindly
forethought, should so manifestly be for once on the side of the demons,
and take a ghastly pleasure in the torments of an afflicted
fellow-creature. Apart, I struggled with the horned difficulty, and
strove to find the solution, but without the hint of a clue; beset by
mystery and contradiction, I saw nothing that might help me, and began
to wonder whether, after all, I had not escaped from the white mist of
the suburb at too dear a rate. I hinted something of my thought to the
professor; I said enough to let him know that I was in the most acute
perplexity, but the moment after regretted what I had done, when I saw
his face contort with a spasm of pain.
"My dear Miss Lally," he said, "you surely do not wish to leave us? No,
no, you would not do it. You do not know how I rely on you; how
confidently I go forward, assured that you are here to watch over my
children. You, Miss Lally, are my rear-guard; for, let me tell you, that
the business in which I am engaged is not wholly devoid of peril. You
have not forgotten what I said the first morning here; my lips are shut
by an old and firm resolve, till they can open to utter no ingenious
hypothesis or vague surmise but irrefragable fact, as certain as a
demonstration in mathematics. Think over it, Miss Lally, not for a
moment would I endeavor to keep you here against your own instincts, and
yet I tell you frankly that I am persuaded that it is here, here amidst
the woods, that your duty lies."
I was touched by the eloquence of his tone, and by the remembrance that
the man, after all, had been my salvation, and I gave him my hand on a
promise to serve him loyally and without question. A few days later the
rector of our church, a little church, gray and severe and quaint, that
hovered on the very banks of the river and watched the tides swim and
return, came to see us, and Professor Gregg easily persuaded him to stay
and share our dinner. Mr. Meyrick was a member of an antique family of
squires, whose old manor house stood amongst the hills some seven miles
away, and thus rooted in the soil, the rector was a living store of all
the old fading customs and lore of the country. His manner, genial with
a deal of retired oddity, won on Professor Gregg; and towards the
cheese, when a curious Burgundy had begun its incantations, the two men
glowed like the wine, and talked of philology with the enthusiasm of a
burgess over the peerage. The parson was expounding the pronunciation of
the Welsh _ll_, and producing sounds like the gurgle of his native
brooks, when Professor Gregg struck in.
"By the way," he said, "that was a very odd word I met with the other
day. You know my boy, poor Jervase Cradock. Well, he has got the bad
habit of talking to himself, and the day before yesterday I was walking
in the garden here and heard him; he was evidently quite unconscious of
my presence. A lot of what he said I couldn't make out, but one word
struck me distinctly. It was such an odd sound; half-sibilant,
half-guttural, and as quaint as those double _ll_'s you have been
demonstrating. I do not know whether I can give you an idea of the
sound. "Ishakshar" is perhaps as near as I can get; but the _k_ ought to
be a Greek _chi_ or a Spanish _j_. Now what does it mean in Welsh?"
"In Welsh?" said the parson. "There is no such word in Welsh, nor any
word remotely resembling it. I know the book-Welsh, as they call it, and
the colloquial dialects as well as any man, but there's no word like
that from Anglesea to Usk. Besides, none of the Cradocks speak a word of
Welsh; it's dying out about here."
"Really. You interest me extremely, Mr. Meyrick. I confess the word
didn't strike me as having the Welsh ring. But I thought it might be
some local corruption."
"No, I never heard such a word, or anything like it. Indeed," he added,
smiling whimsically, "if it belongs to any language, I should say it
must be that of the fairies,--the Tylwydd Têg, as we call them."
The talk went on to the discovery of a Roman villa in the neighborhood;
and soon after I left the room, and sat down apart to wonder at the
drawing together of such strange clues of evidence. As the professor had
spoken of the curious word, I had caught the glint of his eye upon me;
and though the pronunciation he gave was grotesque in the extreme, I
recognized the name of the stone of sixty characters mentioned by
Solinus, the black seal shut up in some secret drawer of the study,
stamped forever by a vanished race with signs that no man could read,
signs that might, for all I knew, be the veils of awful things done long
ago, and forgotten before the hills were moulded into form.
When, the next morning, I came down, I found Professor Gregg pacing the
terrace in his eternal walk.
"Look at that bridge," he said when he saw me, "observe the quaint and
Gothic design, the angles between the arches, and the silvery gray of
the stone in the awe of the morning light. I confess it seems to me
symbolic; it should illustrate a mystical allegory of the passage from
one world to another."
"Professor Gregg," I said quietly, "it is time that I knew something of
what has happened, and of what is to happen."
For the moment he put me off, but I returned again with the same
question in the evening, and then Professor Gregg flamed with
excitement. "Don't you understand yet?" he cried. "But I have told you a
good deal; yes, and shown you a good deal. You have heard pretty nearly
all that I have heard, and seen what I have seen; or at least," and his
voice chilled as he spoke, "enough to make a good deal clear as noonday.
The servants told you, I have no doubt, that the wretched boy Cradock
had another seizure the night before last; he awoke me with cries in
that voice you heard in the garden, and I went to him, and God forbid
you should see what I saw that night. But all this is useless; my time
here is drawing to a close; I must be back in town in three weeks, as I
have a course of lectures to prepare, and need all my books about me. In
a very few days it will be all over, and I shall no longer hint, and no
longer be liable to ridicule as a madman and a quack. No, I shall speak
plainly, and I shall be heard with such emotions as perhaps no other man
has ever drawn from the breasts of his fellows."
He paused, and seemed to grow radiant with the joy of great and
wonderful discovery.
"But all that is for the future, the near future certainly, but still
the future," he went on at length. "There is something to be done yet;
you will remember my telling you that my researches were not altogether
devoid of peril? Yes, there is a certain amount of danger to be faced; I
did not know how much when I spoke on the subject before, and to a
certain extent I am still in the dark. But it will be a strange
adventure, the last of all, the last demonstration in the chain."
He was walking up and down the room as he spoke, and I could hear in his
voice the contending tones of exultation and despondence, or perhaps I
should say awe, the awe of a man who goes forth on unknown waters, and I
thought of his allusion to Columbus on the night he had laid his book
before me. The evening was a little chilly, and a fire of logs had been
lighted in the study where we were, and the remittent flame and the glow
on the walls reminded me of the old days. I was sitting silent in an
armchair by the fire, wondering over all I had heard, and still vainly
speculating as to the secret springs concealed from me under all the
phantasmagoria I had witnessed, when I became suddenly aware of a
sensation that change of some sort had been at work in the room, and
that there was something unfamiliar in its aspect. For some time I
looked about me, trying in vain to localize the alteration that I knew
had been made; the table by the window, the chairs, the faded settee
were all as I had known them. Suddenly, as a sought-for recollection
flashes into the mind, I knew what was amiss. I was facing the
professor's desk, which stood on the other side of the fire, and above
the desk was a grimy looking bust of Pitt, that I had never seen there
before. And then I remembered the true position of this work of art; in
the furthest corner by the door was an old cupboard, projecting into the
room, and on the top of the cupboard, fifteen feet from the floor, the
bust had been, and there no doubt it had delayed, accumulating dirt
since the early years of the century.
I was utterly amazed, and sat silent still, in a confusion of thought.
There was, so far as I knew, no such thing as a step-ladder in the
house, for I had asked for one to make some alterations in the curtains
of my room; and a tall man standing on a chair would have found it
impossible to take down the bust. It had been placed not on the edge of
the cupboard, but far back against the wall; and Professor Gregg was, if
anything, under the average height.
"How on earth did you manage to get down Pitt?" I said at last.
The professor looked curiously at me, and seemed to hesitate a little.
"They must have found you a step-ladder, or perhaps the gardener brought
in a short ladder from outside."
"No, I have had no ladder of any kind. Now, Miss Lally," he went on with
an awkward simulation of jest, "there is a little puzzle for you; a
problem in the manner of the inimitable Holmes; there are the facts,
plain and patent; summon your acuteness to the solution of the puzzle.
For Heaven's sake," he cried with a breaking voice, "say no more about
it. I tell you, I never touched the thing," and he went out of the room
with horror manifest on his face, and his hand shook and jarred the door
behind him.
I looked round the room in vague surprise, not at all realizing what had
happened, making vain and idle surmises by way of explanation, and
wondering at the stirring of black waters by an idle word, and the
trivial change of an ornament. "This is some petty business, some whim
on which I have jarred," I reflected; "the professor is perhaps
scrupulous and superstitious over trifles, and my question may have
outraged unacknowledged fears, as though one killed a spider or spilled
the salt before the very eyes of a practical Scotchwoman." I was
immersed in these fond suspicions, and began to plume myself a little on
my immunity from such empty fears, when the truth fell heavily as lead
upon my heart, and I recognized with cold terror that some awful
influence had been at work. The bust was simply inaccessible; without a
ladder no one could have touched it.
I went out to the kitchen and spoke as quietly as I could to the
housemaid.
"Who moved that bust from the top of the cupboard, Anne?" I said to her.
"Professor Gregg says he has not touched it. Did you find an old
step-ladder in one of the outhouses?"
The girl looked at me blankly.
"I never touched it," she said. "I found it where it is now the other
morning when I dusted the room. I remember now, it, was Wednesday
morning, because it was the morning after Cradock was taken bad in the
night. My room is next to his, you know, miss," the girl went on
piteously; "and it was awful to hear how he cried and called out names
that I couldn't understand. It made me feel all afraid, and then master
came, and I heard him speak, and he took down Cradock to the study and
gave him something."
"And you found that bust moved the next morning?"
"Yes, miss, there was a queer sort of a smell in the study when I came
down and opened the windows; a bad smell it was, and I wondered what it
could be. Do you know, miss, I went a long time ago to the Zoo in London
with my cousin Thomas Barker, one afternoon that I had off, when I was
at Mrs. Prince's in Stanhope Gate, and we went into the snake-house to
see the snakes, and it was just the same sort of a smell, very sick it
made me feel, I remember, and I got Barker to take me out. And it was
just the same kind of a smell in the study, as I was saying, and I was
wondering what it could be from, when I see that bust with Pitt cut in
it standing on the master's desk, and I thought to myself, now who has
done that, and how have they done it? And when I came to dust the
things, I looked at the bust, and I saw a great mark on it where the
dust was gone, for I don't think it can have been touched with a duster
for years and years, and it wasn't like finger-marks, but a large patch
like, broad and spread out. So I passed my hand over it, without
thinking what I was doing, and where that patch was it was all sticky
and slimy, as if a snail had crawled over it. Very strange, isn't it,
miss? and I wonder who can have done it, and how that mess was made."
The well-meant gabble of the servant touched me to the quick. I lay down
upon my bed, and bit my lip that I should not cry out loud in the sharp
anguish of my terror and bewilderment. Indeed, I was almost mad with
dread; I believe that if it had been daylight I should have fled hot
foot, forgetting all courage and all the debt of gratitude that was due
to Professor Gregg, not caring whether my fate were that I must starve
slowly so long as I might escape from the net of blind and panic fear
that every day seemed to draw a little closer round me. If I knew, I
thought, if I knew what there were to dread, I could guard against it;
but here, in this lonely house, shut in on all sides by the olden woods
and the vaulted hills, terror seems to spring inconsequent from every
covert, and the flesh is aghast at the half-heard murmurs of horrible
things. All in vain I strove to summon scepticism to my aid, and
endeavored by cool common-sense to buttress my belief in a world of
natural order, for the air that blew in at the open window was a mystic
breath, and in the darkness I felt the silence go heavy and sorrowful
as a mass of requiem, and I conjured images of strange shapes gathering
fast amidst the reeds, beside the wash of the river.
In the morning, from the moment that I set foot in the breakfast-room I
felt that the unknown plot was drawing to a crisis; the professor's face
was firm and set, and he seemed hardly to hear our voices when we spoke.
"I am going out for rather a long walk," he said, when the meal was
over. "You mustn't be expecting me, now, or thinking anything has
happened if I don't turn up to dinner. I have been getting stupid
lately, and I dare say a miniature walking tour will do me good. Perhaps
I may even spend the night in some little inn, if I find any place that
looks clean and comfortable."
I heard this, and knew by my experience of Professor Gregg's manner that
it was no ordinary business or pleasure that impelled him. I knew not,
nor even remotely guessed, where he was bound, nor had I the vaguest
notion of his errand, but all the fear of the night before returned; and
as he stood, smiling, on the terrace, ready to set out, I implored him
to stay, and to forget all his dreams of the undiscovered continent.
"No, no, Miss Lally," he replied, still smiling, "it's too late now.
_Vestigia nulla retrorsum_, you know, is the device of all true
explorers, though I hope it won't be literally true in my ease. But,
indeed, you are wrong to alarm yourself so; I look upon my little
expedition as quite commonplace; no more exciting than a day with the
geological hammers. There is a risk, of course, but so there is on the
commonest excursion. I can afford to be jaunty; I am doing nothing so
hazardous as 'Arry does a hundred times over in the course of every Bank
Holiday. Well, then, you must look more cheerfully; and so good-by till
to-morrow at latest."
He walked briskly up the road, and I saw him open the gate that marks
the entrance of the wood, and then he vanished in the gloom of the
trees.
All the day passed heavily with a strange darkness in the air, and again
I felt as if imprisoned amidst the ancient woods, shut in an olden land
of mystery and dread, and as if all was long ago and forgotten by the
living outside. I hoped and dreaded, and when the dinner-hour came, I
waited expecting to hear the professor's step in the hall, and his voice
exulting at I knew not what triumph. I composed my face to welcome him
gladly, but the night descended dark, and he did not come.
In the morning when the maid knocked at my door, I called out to her,
and asked if her master had returned; and when she replied that his
bedroom stood open and empty, I felt the cold clasp of despair. Still, I
fancied he might have discovered genial company, and would return for
luncheon, or perhaps in the afternoon, and I took the children for a
walk in the forest, and tried my best to play and laugh with them, and
to shut out the thoughts of mystery and veiled terror. Hour after hour I
waited, and my thoughts grew darker; again the night came and found me
watching, and at last, as I was making much ado to finish my dinner, I
heard steps outside and the sound of a man's voice.
The maid came in and looked oddly at me.
"Please, miss," she began, "Mr. Morgan the gardener wants to speak to
you for a minute, if you didn't mind."
"Show him in, please," I answered, and I set my lips tight.
The old man came slowly into the room, and the servant shut the door
behind him.
"Sit down, Mr. Morgan," I said; "what is it that you want to say to me?"
"Well, miss, Mr. Gregg he gave me something for you yesterday morning,
just before he went off; and he told me particular not to hand it up
before eight o'clock this evening exactly, if so be as he wasn't back
again home before, and if he should come home before I was just to
return it to him in his own hands. So, you see, as Mr. Gregg isn't here
yet, I suppose I'd better give you the parcel directly."
He pulled out something from his pocket, and gave it to me, half rising.
I took it silently, and seeing that Morgan seemed doubtful as to what he
was to do next, I thanked him and bade him good-night, and he went out.
I was left alone in the room with the parcel in my hand,--a paper parcel
neatly sealed and directed to me, with the instructions Morgan had
quoted all written in the professor's large loose hand. I broke the
seals with a choking at my heart, and found an envelope inside,
addressed also, but open, and I took the letter out.
* * * * *
"MY DEAR MISS LALLY," it began, "To quote the old logic manual, the case
of your reading this note is a case of my having made a blunder of some
sort, and, I am afraid, a blunder that turns these lines into a
farewell. It is practically certain that neither you nor anyone else
will ever see me again. I have made my will with provision for this
eventuality, and I hope you will consent to accept the small remembrance
addressed to you, and my sincere thanks for the way in which you joined
your fortunes to mine. The fate which has come upon me is desperate and
terrible beyond the remotest dreams of man; but this fate you have a
right to know--if you please. If you look in the left-hand drawer of my
dressing-table, you will find the key of the escritoire, properly
labelled. In the well of the escritoire is a large envelope sealed and
addressed to your name. I advise you to throw it forthwith into the
fire; you will sleep better of nights if you do so. But if you must know
the history of what has happened, it is all written down for you to
read."
* * * * *
The signature was firmly written below, and again I turned the page and
read out the words one by one, aghast and white to the lips, my hands
cold as ice, and sickness choking me. The dead silence of the room, and
the thought of the dark woods and hills closing me in on every side,
oppressed me, helpless and without capacity, and not knowing where to
turn for counsel. At last I resolved that though knowledge should haunt
my whole life and all the days to come, I must know the meaning of the
strange terrors that had so long tormented me, rising gray, dim, and
awful, like the shadows in the wood at dusk. I carefully carried out
Professor Gregg's directions, and not without reluctance broke the seal
of the envelope, and spread out his manuscript before me. That
manuscript I always carry with me, and I see that I cannot deny your
unspoken request to read it. This, then, was what I read that night,
sitting at the desk, with a shaded lamp beside me.